On October 5, 2010, President Obama signed legislation requiring the federal government to replace the term “mental retardation” with “intellectual disability” in many areas of government. This measure, known as Rosa’s Law, strips the terms “mental retardation” and “mentally retarded” from federal health, education, and labor policy. “Intellectual disability” or “individual with an intellectual disability” are being inserted in place of these outdated terms. The rights of individuals with disabilities remain the same.

ADE is in the process of updating relevant reports, online applications, and other documentation to comply with this federal requirement. References to “mental retardation” will change to “intellectual disability.” Acronyms for the disability categories MIMR, MOMR, and SMR will read MIID, MOID, and SID. References to a “mentally retarded individual” will change to an “individual with an intellectual disability” in resource documents, memos, and other supporting documentation throughout ADE. The conversion from MR to ID in SAIS will take effect when SAIS opens for FY 2014 in July 2013: reports will show disability categories MIID, MOID, and SID. Other ADE data collection applications and resource materials will continue to be updated with the new acronyms and descriptions through December 2013.

SAIS business rules were created identifying the areas within SAIS to be modified to accommodate this change. The rules can be found here within the “Business Rules” section of the webpage under fiscal year “2014.” More information about the MR to ID conversion in SAIS can be found in the School Finance “Hot Topics” announcements, available here.

Please be aware of the changes in red to the verbiage in the original email below regarding the replacement of “mental retardation” (MR) with “intellectual disability” (ID).

For FY 2013 SAIS reporting purposes, student management systems (SMS) should not replace MR codes with ID codes as the SAIS SPED reporting specifications have not changed. It is allowable for SMS vendors to change their system display to show ID as a valid need category, as long as the transaction code values uploaded to SAIS includes the MR codes instead of the ID codes. If a code of ID is submitted to SAIS for FY 2013 reporting, it will be rejected as ID codes are not valid for the current reporting year.

It has come to our attention that some IEP program vendors have modified their software to remove references to MR and have replaced with ID to comply with Rosa’s Law. This can be problematic if the data from the IEP software containing the modified ID codes are rolled up into your SMS. If this is the case for your district, the ID codes will need to be manually changed to MR before creating an upload file and submitting to SAIS.

If you are unsure if your IEP program or SMS vendor has made changes that replace MR codes with ID codes, please take the time to check and confirm as soon as possible. Vender development time may be required to address problems and/or manual changes may need to be made by your data entry personnel and with the October 1 special education child count approaching, we want you to have enough time to submit correct data to SAIS.